This invention relates to travel pricing, and more particularly to pricing for air travel using travel planning computer systems.
Air travel tickets are commonly priced using one or more units of price called “fares.” In the airline industry, the word “fare” is generally used to refer to a price published by an airline for one-way travel between two cities (a “market”) that may be used to price one or more flights on a ticket. A single fare may be used to pay for more than one flight, subject to fare-specific rules. The term “fare-component” is commonly used to refer to a fare and the flights of a ticket paid for by that fare.
Airlines commonly require that the fare-components of a ticket be grouped into units called “priceable-units” (PUs). A priceable-unit may be thought of as the smallest sub-ticket that could be sold on its own. The purpose of priceable-units is to require certain fares to be sold in conjunction with other fares. For example, it is common for so-called “round-trip” or “tag-2” fares to have rules that require the fares to be grouped with other fares into priceable-units of 2 or 3 or 4 fares known as round-trip, circle-trip and open-jaw priceable-units. For example, a circle-trip priceable-unit is a priceable-unit of 3 or 4 fares arranged in a circle, such as NYC→LAX, LAX→MIA, MIA→NYC. A round-trip priceable-unit is a circle-trip of size 2, such as BOS→LAX, LAX→BOS. Open-jaw priceable-units are circle-trips with one missing fare, such as BOS→SFO, LAX→BOS. Some fares, so-called “one way” or “tag-1” fares, may be used in priceable units of a single fare, such as NYC→SFO however such fares are frequently more expensive than tag-2 fares.
Typically, airlines associate with tag-2 fares various fare rules that limit the fare combinations that may appear within one priceable-unit. For example, it is common for tag-2 fares' rules to require that all fares in the same priceable unit have the same or similar codes (names). Tag-2 fares' rules may also impose restrictions on flight or time combinations. For example, so-called “excursion” fares are tag-2 fares that have rules that impose minimum-stay restrictions such as Saturday-night stay restrictions. Frequently these rules are stated as follows: a certain amount of time must pass between the departure of the first flight in the first fare-component of the priceable-unit and the first flight of the last fare-component of the priceable-unit.
The necessity of grouping certain fares into priceable-units, and the possibility of rules that restrict fare and flight or time combinations within a priceable-unit, implies that there are dependencies between the pricing of different flights on a ticket.